A question I get often, especially around solutions where security is a big concern is “how can we see who looked\opened\updated\deleted an item in our document library. Updates, are easy if you have versioning enabled as it tracks each update in the version history, but what if you don’t want versioning enabled or you need to track the other items? Enter SharePoint audit reports. I previously blogged a detailed post on the audit logs within SharePoint. Basically, once enabled they will record everything that occurs within the site depending on the settings you select. You can find more information on it here. However, the problem with audit reports is you need site collection admin access to see them. This does not work in many instances as most end users don’t (and shouldn’t) have that level of access to your site collection. So how do you get them the reports without manually running the report for them each time they require it? This is what we are going to cover in this series. This post specifically will assist you in preparing the data for your users from the SharePoint GUI.

Quick Note: this may be an old topic, in fact I know it is. I started this blog two years ago and apparently forgot about it. I was going to trash it when I came across it but remembered that I still see a number of requests for setting up audit reports to automatically run for others. So I decided to complete it since it is still relevant for all versions of SharePoint including SharePoint Online

When the business wants to control the data that is displayed to users a great way to do this is with content approval. It’s easy to implement and use. Simply enable the option in version control and anyone with Full Control, Design or Approve role is able to approve the items.

There is a great write-up by Chakkaradeep Chandran on how to automate the approval process of these items. However, what Microsft Flow is missing is the ability to see what status the approval process is at. There are many requests for this information in the Flow forums with no solutions beyond statements that Flow is lacking in this ability. I was able to come up with a working solution to achieve this. So read on to learn how to determine the approval status of a SharePoint list or library item.

The other day a friend of mine, Daniel Glen, asked if I could step in last minute to help out remotely for a presentation to the Nashville O365 User Group. I of course said yes and then promptly dumped all the stuff I had to do that night on my wife (oops). I sent Daniel the tickle trunk of presentations that I was ready to do last minute and I was surprised when he selected Leading Practices for Building Anything SharePoint or O365. It’s an older presentation and one I was actually considering pulling out of my active list. However, as I was reviewing it I found that the core of the presentation still held true with anything you should do with O365 and SharePoint. In many cases, any project could use some or all of the concepts I discussed.

Well the presentation went over very well. It’s a really good group of people there in Nashville and even though I was 2600km (1615+) miles away I can honestly say that session was the most fun I have had yet giving that presentation. Thanks Nashville. Let me know when you need another speaker.

Now that I have completed my series on building a modern solution with SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow I want to start building on that solution. The next enhancement I wanted to do was allow the capture comments from the approver in Microsoft Flow. So whether the approver approved or rejected the request I want to be able to capture the comments if they provided any. Because this is building on my previous solution you can see how that was built by clicking here.

Something that is used a lot in Microsoft Flow is the HTTP request. Whether you are calling a site’s REST endpoint or an Azure function, or in the case of today a SharePoint REST endpoint you need to be able to do something with the data returned. The steps to do that are very simple and only require a free tool called Fiddler. You can download Fiddler here (please note: I have nothing to do with Telerik, it’s just a nice tool I use often). Go ahead and download the tool and we’ll move forward with the steps parsing JSON in Microsoft Flow